I have said it in the past, I will say it again. The best airport to go abroad from India is Chennai International Airport. It is small compared to Mumbai and Delhi, which means less flights depart, fewer people so you will have comfortable space. I am doing this post from Mumbai International Airport, even after privatization this airport has improved little. It is one big corridor in two floors, packed with people every where - easily few thousands and no place to sit, windowless gates and Cigarette smoke everywhere near gates. It is a complete chaos. Compared to the International Airport, the Mumbai Domestic Airport is far better.

Last week I went to Colombo and returned. I found the Arrival terminal in Colombo to be world class and the departure to be the same old airport. On return to India, I was surprised to find a new arrival hall in Chennai International Airport, this one is more spacious, more conveyor belts. One more reason for me to like the Chennai Airport

At Vishwak we have over 10 years of experience with Media and Mobile Portal solutions. Recently we launched www.deliveranexperience.com as a branding site for our offerings with Silverlight, Sharepoint, VPF (Vishwak Portal Framework) and MCDS (Mobile Content Delivery System).

We are showcasing this for the first time in upcoming Digital Hollywood (Fall) event being held at Hollywood from 29th Oct to 1st Nov 2007. DH is a premium event that connects Hollywood and IT industries. I will be there and if you happen to be in LA area, please visit us at Stall #60 at the Grand Ballroom at Hollywood and Highlands.

I have been invited as well as a speaker in a panel discussion on Day 3 (Nov 1):

Track III: 12:50 PM - 2:00 PM - Personalized and Innovative Mobile & Broadband Services: Advertising and Content

• Steve Bava, Group Account Director, WHITTMANHART Interactive
• Mike Fitzsimmons, CEO, Delivery Agent
• Jonathan Cobb, Founder and CEO, Kiptronic
• Venkatarangan Thirumalai, Chairman, Vishwak Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
• Jordan Greene, VP of Mobile Marketing, MindMatics
• Dina Pradel, Vice President of Marketing, StyleFeeder
• Michael J. Pinto, Managing Principal, mCapital, LLC, Moderator

For Session Description & Speaker Bios Click Here

Update 1/Nov/07: My panel went well, Michael did a good job. Though the discussions were more on the advertisement/agency topics I presented an Indian perspective on some of the innovative products that are being launched in India.

As I have said in the past, many times I find interesting articles handpicked and featured in MSN.COM homepage. Today I read one such article on World's Cheapest destinations. It covered about places where you can spend a day for $20 - Laos, Bali, Vietnam, India, Zambia, Tunisia, Honduras, Guatemala, Peru and Argentina. Sadly it has left out Sri Lanka - may be it was because of the ongoing unrest there.

Though India is featured there, don't get fooled. Anything in Travel that falls under luxury is expensive in India compared to other Asian countries. Five Star (though not everyone will be looking) accommodations are the most expensive in India, even Las Vegas is cheaper than Indian Metros. One of our abroad client is visiting us in Chennai this week and Chola Sheraton's per day rate for them is Rs.8800 (USD 225).

Last week just before my Sri Lanka short visit, I finished this audio book. It was "Tough Choices" by Carly Fiorina who spent nearly twenty years at AT & T and Lucent Technologies before working as CEO for HP from 2000 to 2005. The book is a must read (or listen) for people starting their career in a large organization and especially Women Executive's will find themselves relating well to Carly's experiences. The initial chapters are definitely inspirational for fighting against the odds in modern businesses.

If you have read Who says Elephants can't Dance Audio book by Louis Gerstner Jr., the former IBM CEO on how he transformed IBM, you will expect similar material here on what happened in HP. In which case, you will be disappointed. Though there are elaborate coverages on her interview process for the CEO post and her firing from HP board, there is little coverage on her job as CEO. I was surprised to hear her bold statements about few executives who she comes across in her career, some of them quoted by her with actual names I am sure are still around in the industry. She raises strong criticisms about Michael Capellas (Ex-CEO of Compaq) and David Woodley Packard (son of HP co-founder David Packard) in the book.

The title Tough Choices indicates the tough one's Carly had to make in her personal/career life as an individual. I liked her repeatedly used quote in the book about "my soul is still with me".

On being selected as Fortune magazine Top Woman CEO she had the following to say: “After striving my entire career to be judged by my results and my decisions, the coverage of my gender, my appearance and perceptions of my personality would outweigh anything else”

As I have kept noting down in this blog, Microsoft's Live Service offerings are improving day by day. In the recent weeks there have been significant improvement in the search relevance, breadth of offerings and more so on the improved user interface. Today when I went to Live Search Maps, I liked the Single Text box Interface (shown above), the earlier two text boxes UI was a pain to use. What impressed me most was their support for business owners - I searched for "Vishwak Solutions" looking for our company in Redmond, WA. It didn't give up any results, then I clicked on the Help button expecting no useful information or out dated links. I was surprised to see the first topic itself being what I wanted - How to list my business?. The steps that followed was easy to complete and they verified real time with a PIN number by calling the business phone number I had furnished. Overall excellent consumer experience, keep up the good work Live team!

As I wrote yesterday - On 16th October I presented in Sri Lanka DevDay 2007. The audience were more than 500 in number and were enthusiastic bunch, who were very eager to learn new things in technology. This was different from the programs in India, where Audiences are not that excited even when you show them new stuffs. This may be because in India you have lost the charm of big events as too many of them happen that too throughout the year.

Anyways, coming back I presented on two topics I like a lot nowadays - WPF and Silverlight.

WPF, a new way of looking @ your Windows Applications
Overview of Windows Presentation Foundation, the goals behind WPF and the power of XAML language. See for yourself how the UI world around you is changing forever. The session will cover the design and implementation of UI using Microsoft Expression Blend and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 “Orcas”. It will get into discussing about the popular controls in WPF including Layout, Data Binding, Audio/Video, Flow Control and composition techniques. We will wrap up the session by looking into the new features introduced with WPF 3.5.

Silverlight: The web just got richer
See Microsoft’s new arsenal for the web, the cross browser cross platform Silverlight.  In a world where designers had more say in Web Applications this session will show you how developers can get back into the driving seat. The Session will go into details of case studies of applications built with Silverlight 1.0. You will see demos working across browsers seamlessly. We will wrap up the session by discussing the new capabilities that .NET integration is bringing to upcoming Silverlight 1.1 version.

References:
1. The presentations I made (Thanks to Tim Sneath of Microsoft) are available here
2. Most of the demos (other than the demos we built for our customers in Vishwak) are taken from Silverlight and WindowsClient.net sites.

I was in Sri Lanka for last two days on invitation from Microsoft (Sri Lanka) to present on their DevDay 2007 event. The event happened in Mount Lavinia Hotel and I stayed there as well. What a beautiful place this is, with clean unspoiled beaches and adding to the vintage effect given by a Railway station right in the front of the hotel. Imagine the place that has Railway Station in Front and a long unspoiled beach on the other side. The hotel itself has 200 years of history starting as the house of the British governor and moving to various owners. Check out the photos of the place below:

MT. LAVINIA Hotel 16 OCT 2007

Microsoft gave me a beautiful gift, which was a replica of Sigiriya style of art of a Fresco maiden holding flowers. The replica was done on a irregular shaped stone giving it a genuine antique look - may be this is what made the Sri Lankan Customs question me on whether I am smuggling out one of their antique piece out of country. Of course, they allowed me to take it after they found it to be a replica. I have given below the images of the original painting (Left) and the replica (Right) I got.

Earlier today when I was doing a WPF demo in Colombo for Microsoft DevDay 2007 I wanted to show the new Solitaire and  other games rendering smooth UI in Vista. But I didn't find any of the games in my demo laptop. The last I have used the games in Vista was when Vista was in Beta and in Vista Ultimate edition. On further investigation and looking into other Vista installations (Windows Vista Enterprise x64, Vista Business x86) I realized that games are not installed by default in these editions - obviously why do you want them in a business edition of the OS?. The good news is that you can go Programs and Features applet in Control Panel, and install the games. Immediately upon installation, I played and won a game with Solitaire. Hip hip hooray!!!